THE POINT — Texas law enforcement is on the front lines of an international crime
December 15, 2011 6:00 AM
San Antonio Express-News
The same factors that make Texas a corridor for international trade — proximity to Mexico, ports and transportation hubs that link the Lone Star State with the rest of the nation — also make it a corridor for international crime. Chief among those crimes is human trafficking.
A study from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services concluded that 25 percent of the nation's human trafficking victims are in Texas. Another report from Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott found that 20 percent of the 800,000 trafficking victims in the United States pass through Texas.
Between January 2008 and June 2010, the U.S. Justice Department reported more than 2,000 incidents of sex trafficking — the trafficking of people involving the use of force, fraud or coercion to participate in the sex trade. About 1,200 of those incidents involved adults, while 1,000 involved minors.
Those numbers alone should be shocking. But experts believe reported incidents of this modern form of slavery constitute only a small percentage of the actual cases of human trafficking.
Human trafficking is a big criminal enterprise, with Texas playing an outsized role. But Texas leaders — including Abbott and state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio — have raised awareness and strengthened state laws against human trafficking.
That's a major reason why Texas earned a B — the highest grade given — for its efforts to combat human trafficking by Shared Hope International, a nonprofit dedicated to the eradication of sex trafficking and slavery. Texas was one of only four states to earn the high mark.
Tough laws can only have an impact, however, if resources are dedicated to enforce them. The Express-News reported that the Bexar County Sheriff's Office handles about 50 human trafficking cases annually. But on Sept. 1, a $1 million federal grant that funded a human trafficking task force came to an end.
Van de Putte and Abbott fought to obtain a $200,000 state grant that will extend the human trafficking task force for another year. Given San Antonio's location at the nexus of the I-10 and I-35 corridors — two major routes for human trafficking — the loss of federal funding is troubling.
Human trafficking is an international assault on human dignity, with San Antonio and Bexar County on the front lines. If Washington takes the scourge of human trafficking seriously, then it should help fund the efforts of Texas law enforcement to end it.
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